RCMP now involved to find Pierre Poutine

OTTAWA – Elections Canada has turned to the Mounties for help as its 15-month robocalls investigation drags on without signs of progress.

RCMP Sgt. Paul Thompson of the commercial crime unit at Kitchener detachment met with a Guelph resident Kevin Morris on June 27 to get a recording of the deceptive call that sent hundreds of voters to the wrong polling stations on election day in 2011.

Morris, who had saved the call, gave it to the RCMP at the request of Elections Canada investigator John Dickson, who has previously interviewed witnesses who alleged deceptive calls outside of Guelph.

The RCMP went to pick up the recording a month after Elections Canada’s lead investigator Al Mathews filed an affidavit seeking a court order for electronic records. In that affidavit, which was made public last week, Mathews mentions seeking assistance from another member of the RCMP, an unidentified corporal.

The agency confirmed Tuesday for the first time that the Mounties are now playing a role.

“The office of the commissioner of Canada Elections has been assisted by the RCMP in its investigation in fraudulent calls in the 41st general election,” said Diane Benson, a spokeswoman for Elections Canada, but declined to share details.

Previously, the agency has always declined to answer the question, stating only that it could seek assistance from the Mounties if required, and the RCMP won’t say whether it is involved, referring all questions to Elections Canada.

The RCMP involvement comes as the trail of “Pierre Poutine” cools and investigators focus on a single email address that could be their last and only hope of identifying the robocalls suspect.

The agency began investigating shortly after more than 6,000 voters received recorded calls directly to the wrong polling station, apparently in an attempt to keep opposition supporters from the polls.

Elections Canada investigators traced the calls to a disposable cellphone registered to the fictional Pierre Poutine of Separatist Street in Joliette, Que.

But after obtaining records from Internet providers, phone companies and an online payment service, the identity of Poutine remains a mystery.

The court documents made public last week show Mathews was seeking subscriber information and the Internet Protocol (IP) address associated with pierres1630@gmail.com, the Google email account used by Poutine.

Google handed this information over to Mathews in June, but if Poutine was careful setting up the account, the electronic records might not help trace him. Poutine could have accessed Gmail using the same IP addresses that have already lead investigators on a goose chase.

Mathews obtained IP data from the Edmonton voice-broadcaster company RackNine that Poutine used to launch the robocalls. The RackNine records revealed two IP addresses that had been used by both Poutine and Andrew Prescott, the deputy campaign manager for the Conservative candidate Marty Burke in Guelph.

Prescott has denied any involvement in the scheme and has refused Mathews’ request for an interview.

One of the IP addresses uncovered by RackNine was traced back to a Saskatchewan-based proxy server, a web service used to mask the origin of Internet traffic.

Mathews travelled to Saskatoon to swear out a statement and obtain a court order compelling the operator of freeproxyserver.ca to turn over electronic logs. He found, however, that the service kept its data for only about 24 hours and Poutine’s fingerprints had been purged long ago.

The other IP address recovered from RackNine, originally thought to be the best chance of catching Poutine, has also proved “inconclusive,” according to a sworn statement Mathews filed in court in May.

Rogers Cable had turned over the identity of the subscriber who was using the IP during the election but it turned out to be a private residence where no one had any apparent connection to the election campaign.

Although the residence had a Wi-Fi connection that could have allowed interlopers to use it, it was located far from Conservative Marty Burke’s campaign headquarters. Yet several members of the Burke campaign team used the same IP address to connect with the Conservative Party’s voter database system in Ottawa in the final weeks of the campaign. So far, there is no way of knowing who used it with Poutine’s RackNine account.

Other attempts to track Poutine have also failed.

The suspect set up an PayPal account to pay RackNine for the calls. Mathews discovered that the account was funded using “burner” credit cards, untraceable Visa and MasterCards purchased with cash at two Shoppers Drug Mart locations in Guelph.

Recordings from the closed-circuit security cameras in the store that might have produced images of someone buying the cards had been wiped long before Mathews came looking for them.

The first lead in the case, the disposable Virgin Mobile cellphone registered to a Pierre Poutine of Joliette, Quebec, also proved completely untraceable.

Chief Electoral Officer Marc Mayrand told a committee of MPs in March that they should consider changes to the Elections Act to regulate the use of robocalls and other new campaign technologies in future.